Isn’t that something we all promise ourselves that we’ll do – someday? Create that master checklist that guides us through routine tasks such as upgrades.

There are numerous paper  checklists  publishers provide – however the items are often tediously redundant and it seems so 1980′s to be flipping through 15 pages of photocopied instructions.

Today I’m off to upgrade a straightforward MAS 200 system and I’ll be trying  Google Tasks as my checklist generator.

Google Tasks is free – and located in your Gmail account listed on the left side as “tasks”. It’s a decidedly bare bones way to keep a list of items you need to complete.

Before I leave I’ve created a Google Tasks list on my desktop computer. Using software for the iPhone I synchronize the tasks in real time so that I can use them while on site with the client.

If I find that I need more items in my task list — I can add those on my iPhone and they’ll be synchronized back to my desktop list of tasks.

What I hope is that with a little tweaking that I can soon have a set of tasks that become my master implementation guide that also travels with me wherever I have my IPhone or access to the web.

You can easily drag, drop and add items just about anywhere on your Google Task list.

There are also Apps you can download to your iPhone – such as GeeTasks (shown above) which will synchronize your tasks so  you can use your list deep within a server room that gets no cell reception.

Google Tasks

You can click the image on the left and read the whole advertisement. The bigger question for most consultants is whether these types of free advertising sites work to attract prospects?

Yes! This advertising works. It will attract responses. You may even be busier than you ever imagined – so long as you don’t mind working for three kinds of people (and they all share a common distaste for paying for consulting fees).

Here are the three primary types of prospect you’ll be sure to attract with a free advertisement that primarily offers low cost services.

The Three Types Who Respond To Craigslist

Advertising on Craigslist is not a whole lot different than posting a web page and offering services to Internet visitors who randomly land on your site (the important word here is randomly because when the lead is from a random visitor it’s 98% worthless).

Random visitors who stumble across your site (and those of your competitors) are nearly always after a bit of free advice.

Providing free advice may make you feel good as a consultant – but it’s not a sustainable business model.

Here’s the three types of random leads who, in my experience, contact you in response to advertisements for low cost MAS90 consulting:

The unemployed, soon to be unemployed, newly hired and totally untrained, overseas workers looking to learn about MAS90,  and curious competitors: Identify most of these  early by the anonymous email address they use to contact you.

Some of the contacts will be from competitors wondering if advertising low cost rates for MAS90 really works.

Many contacts will be from the newly unemployed looking to learn about MAS90 for their next job.

Advertising cheap services attracts those looking for free services (cheapskates correctly assume they’ll be able to ask several free questions before you charge them).

My experience is that once cheapskates get free information they stop responding to your inquiries.

Yet, like Lucy pulling the football from poor Charlie Brown,  many consultants never  learn that these leads aren’t worth pursuing – even after the ball’s been yanked  dozens of times.

Companies who’ve had 5 different MAS90 consultants over the last 2 years – and have nothing good to say about any of them: These types of prospects are the easiest to identify yet consultants engage in all sorts of self-talk to convince themselves that the lead is better than it is.

Prospects who badmouth their former consulting firm – will soon bad mouth you.

The conversation with these prospects start off the same way as the type above.

“Consulting”with these types of prospects is about them getting free information and telling you (over and over)  the story about how the last five consultants sucked.

Your dealings with this company will be like one big free initial one hour meeting — except that meeting will go for 6 hours.

Anyone who has used 5 consultants over the last 2 years and is looking for the sixth on Craigslist will undoubtedly also be searching for the seventh soon.

Computer consultants trolling for subcontractors: Though not as prominent as they once were – there are still a decent number of computer consultants who know nothing about MAS 90 accounting software but are willing to hold themselves out as experts to their clients.

Usually I’ve found that these consultants are network technicians managing an internal IT system (hardware, networks, etc) who’ve been asked informally whether they know anything about accounting systems.

Some of these consultants, not wanting to turn down a dollar, may mis-specify an upgrade or new deal purchase.

Then they troll for a low-cost MAS 90 consultant that they can hire for $50/hour (paid in 1/10 of an hour increments) who will also give them a free initial 3 hour consultation (which the originating consultant will bill back to their client).

In these situations the IT consultants will want to re-bill (aka mark up) the rate of the MAS 90 consultant under their own consulting firm.

If you’re ever in a situation where a computer consultant comes to you stating that they know what software the client needs and they’re just looking to make the purchase (for the right price) – run for the hills.

99.9% of these “we know what we need and here’s a list of software we’ll purchase today if the price is right” deals tend to be mis-specified.

And when the deal goes bad guess who will be left to refund the money?

Is There Money To Be Made In Discounted Online Consulting Services?

In my experience very few companies who are searching online for discounted consulting services will turn into paying loyal customers.

Consultants in general fool themselves into thinking that the Internet visitor who stumbled over their web site and is asking for a quote or free tip has selected their firm uniquely.

In reality most of today’s Internet visitors responding to a random advertisement (with no other relationship to your firm) are also simultaneously engaging (or attempting to engage) with half a dozen other consultants to see which company will offer them the cheapest service.

It’s a race to the bottom that you don’t want to be in – unless you just don’t want to be in business in 3 years.

Images: Flickr

This doesn’t mean your documents will be shared with everyone. Rather Google is notifying their users that only publicly shared items will be indexed. Users should double check on any publicly shared items to make sure that they really should be public (here’s how).

While on the surface this may seem like an invasion of privacy, and it might be if you haven’t taken care to make sure you have not shared sensitive items, it also could be a great way for web visitors to search and find your site.

Imagine if you publicly publish a  list of tips and tricks for a product that you work. By linking to this public document you’re telling Google that it’s ok for a user to find the document in a search. Which in this case is exactly what you want.

Rather than be concerned by this as a privacy issue I think everyone should focus on the search potential.

Increasingly potential customers are doing very specific keyword searches on the web. The more links you have from different areas the more likely they are to see you as an authority on the subject matter.

The higher your perceived authority — the less competition that you’ll have

Used smartly, these shared public documents could be another effective way to reach potential clients who increasingly are searching for help on support issues prior to calling in the consultant. The more (free) ways that a potential client can find you – the better!

The full email from Google is (click on the image to see it full sized on your monitor) :

That mythical  ”some day” never seems to arrive for most of us.

Because we’re busy putting out other client forest fires. Then for a while the “pay as you go” support works pretty well.  Since you’re busy – no need to worry about changing the way you bill.

Suddenly as the economy ebbs and flows your billable support calls trail off. Clients stop calling. Without incoming phone calls you have no reliable source of income. Yet you still have the expense of paying staff to sit by the phone and wait for calls.

Think of how crazy the pay-as-you-go support model is.

For absolutely no money (unless a client calls) you staff a call center with people who will respond to a client call on a moment’s notice. If you’re not offering a support plan – clients pay you nothing for setting up this support center.

See a problem yet?

None of these clients pay a dime until they use your services. Wouldn’t you like to buy car insurance that way? Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to pay anything for health insurance until the month you knew that you needed to make a claim?

Of course all those ideas about not paying for insurance until it’s used are silly. The whole concept of insurance is for it to spread the risk of a loss based on a reasonable monthly or annual premium.

Are your clients paying that premium? Or do you allow them to steal you blind by only charging them when they call?

How To Avoid Being Robbed

1. You MUST have a plan. If you do not have a written plan and a policy of how your support is offered then the client or prospect is going to negotiate you into offering services on an hourly basis. The problem with hourly basis is that you will miss the opportunity to bill for many hours due to staff distraction, clients will argue that quick questions should not be billed and the value of a support call cannot be adequately measured in fractions of hours.
2. Stop billing normal consulting time in any fractions of an hour. Bill in whole hours only. There’s no rule that says you must bill in fractions of an hour. For the most part small unit billings ignore the overhead involved with billing, collecting and documenting the time that was actually worked.
3. Take away any notation on your invoices about hours. Get clients used to seeing an amount on your invoice that is not openly tied to a number of hours. An added benefit of removing hours from bills is that clients are far less likely to argue about the time billed for a call when all they can see is the value. If the client argues that they’re not getting value from your support, and your consultants are adequately trained then invite the customer to make your competitors life miserable and unprofitable use a competitor.

Support Plan Examples

The easiest way to solve the problem of clients talking you out of requiring a support plan – is do NOT take any new clients who do not agree to go onto a plan.

Want to know a secret?

Once you tell your new clients that they MUST be on a prepaid plan – over 95% of the qualified prospects WILL TAKE THE PLAN!

Do not go into any new client meetings without copies of your written plans. Before the meeting practice saying “we only offer support based on our prepaid plan”.

And stick to your plans!

I mean it. Seriously. The prospects will ask to pay hourly.

You only have to know two words:

NO.

Sorry.

The good clients WILL pay — but  not before they first test to see if you’ll cave in and offer a cheaper solution.

Can you blame them? It doesn’t hurt to try. Don’t cave in and offer to provide support on an hourly as-needed basis.

I know this because for the last 8+ years I have not taken on a single new customer who did not agree to join my prepaid phone support plan. This means that the tire-kickers who send emails “checking rates” are quickly disposed of without my first spending time diagnosing their problem and invariably prescribing a free solution. What’s left is quality paying support clients who stay with me for three to five years (or more).

Stuck on what to offer? Here are copies of both my support plans. Feel free to modify them for your own usage and realize that I offer them as-is without any guarantees.

Sage MAS 90 Support Plans

After arriving at a client site you find that you’re missing that one CD required to complete a software installation?

In the past I’ve tried creating a master set of CDs and carefully inserted them into a looseleaf binder. The problem? I kept leaving the most important ones behind in the client’s CD tray. Then I’d go to look for it at the next client and the CD that I needed was missing!

I’ve rushed into the office on days that I knew I had to be out on-site with a client and hustled to burn the CD’s that I thought I might need. What I found is this always resulted in the client  having the exact CDs  needed and my early morning dash to the office was for nothing.

Instead I’m going to tell you how you can completely solve the problem of always having every CD at your fingertips without spending any extra time or pre-planning. It’s dirt cheap – and as a plus if a client ever calls to say they can’t find their Crystal Reports Disks (or insert favorite application disk that clients love to lose) – then you can send a copy to the client via your iPhone/BlackBerry or Android device in seconds.The solution that I’ve been using for well over a year now is Sugarsync.

This brilliantly simple solution allows you to synchronize an entire folder (and all subfolders) from your local computer to their servers (aka – the clouds).

What I do to make this work  is immediately take any of the source CDs that I receive in the office and use a common utility like Winzip to make them into one compressed file.

Then on my local computer I have a folder structure such as:

Source Disks\

Then beneath that I may have

\CrystalDisks\Version 8.5

\CrystalDisks\Version 10

Anything that I place into the \Source Disks\ subfolders automatically synchronizes up to Sugarsyncs servers.

Once the files are stored on the Sugarsync servers then I can have access to them either:

• Via the web
• Via the free iPhone application
• Via the free BlackBerry application
• Via the free Android application

The beauty of this system is that it’s ridiculously easy to send a client a complete set of source CDs right from your smartphone.

Here’s an example of how my Sugarsync iPhone application is setup.

By clicking on any of these folders I have access to my entire version library of CDs.

For example — if a client is missing a Crystal 8.5 Disk – I can navigate to the Crystal Disks folder (shown above) within which I have all my relevant Crystal Reports source disks zipped up.

Now to send a copy to a client (all that’s actually sent is a private URL for them to download the file from) I click on the set of disks and am prompted to enter the email address that I would like to send the link to.

I can enter a message to indicate that the files they need are included in the link.

If you aren’t using Sugarsync to store all of your source disks then you’re just working too hard. The cost is $99 per year for 60 GB of storage. Other plans are available here.

Link: Sugarsync